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Topic: The underappreciated/unsuccessful but you like it thread (Read 2085 times)

Here's a thread you may like. List your gear that seemed to go over everybody's' heads or simply failed in the marketplace but you like it anyway. No fair listing things like the VG-99 etc. - we ALL know about those kinds of products.

Here's mine, and it may surprise you- the EHX Lumberjack pedal: http://www.ehx.com/products/lumberjackYou don't hear about it very much and, although it's still available, I don't think it's a big hit.Why I like it: at low settings it's the best product I've found for that "torn speaker" sound used in the fifties and sixties when musicians would actually play through damaged or blown out speakers to get a distorted sound. Think early Kinks. ...At high settings you can also economically spay the animal of your choice, possibly even yourself, so use with care! It sounds like a 60's transistor amp with a Rickenbacker six string bridge pickup going through a treble booster and everything cranked. Ouch!

Back to the positive, for no reason I can think of whatsoever gives a bit of a hollow body vibe to solid body guitars, again at low settings. Plug in a Les Paul, turn the LJ down low, and you can hear a bit of a 335 vibe in the sound.

Well let's see, if you're talking about gear I still own that meets either being under-appreciated and/or unsuccessful but I like, then I'll list a few (not all) and if you are talking about gear I no longer own, then that list would be amusingly / perhaps painfully too long:

One of the best bang for buck things I use is the Behringer B212D powered monitor. For $259 they are a great deal. They don't sound like my Bose L1 but I could buy 10 of them for what I paid for that. I have used them for an extra floor monitor when needed, as power for my guitar/amp modeling rig and anywhere I need a little extra. Many musician look down their noses at Behringer but I have found these things to be pretty bullet proof. I have one that is about ten years old. Hundreds of gigs. It's look pretty beat up but it still works.

Always received compliments on my sound, other guitar players couldn't believe there was no tube

People would always comment that my band sounded just like the "record"

I've moved to a GR-55 based rig, but still can't re-create some staple sounds

Why?

it was DSP device without a tube. In the early 90s most believed it wasn't possible to get a good guitar tone without a tube - the reason they released the Voodu Valve (Chameleon with a tube)

it wasn't a modeler, so those that did allow for digital sounds as acceptable viewed it as a non player

it didn't have flexible effect routing, so tweakers didn't like it

I always found it very easy to create great sounds very quickly. Although it didn't do modeling, I was able to get very close to original sounds such that the majority of listeners believed we were playing songs exactly like the artist. I knew they weren't exact matches, but it was close enough in the context of playing a song that it worked very well. I often consider going back to that rig (Chameleon/GR-30) when I get frustrated with the GR-55 limitations. [/list]

Zoom 9030 - Back in mid 1990's Every Sound designer I knew in LA and NY had one in their FX rack Adrian Belew cut tracks for NIN with only a 9030 and its ring modulator. Trent Reznor used to use the Cab sim on the 9030

Zoom 9030 - Back in mid 1990's Every Sound designer I knew in LA and NY had one in their FX rack Adrian Belew cut tracks for NIN with only a 9030 and its ring modulator. Trent Reznor used to use the Cab sim on the 9030

Spicetone 6Appeal hexaphonic distortion. Basically a full fledged multitimbral all-analog synthesizer that uses guitar strings as the oscillator and 3 switchable analog fuzz/distortion/overdrive circuits as the waveshaper. 2 LFOs, a step sequencer and a full polyphonic ADSR envelope section that can modulate up to 6 parameters each on individual strings. Hundreds of parameters, fully digitally controlled with desktop editor, 48 presets, individual string breakout box functionality, and a fully functional 13 pin output for hexaphonic post-processing. Sound quality is excellent, tons of headroom, tons of clean gain, excellent sounding fuzz circuits, versatile clean blend options. Great sounding switchable pre and post gain bass compensation circuits for recreating the tone of neck pickup with a hex bridge pickup. I consider it to be the greatest pedal ever made. Sadly I have yet to encounter a single other user.

Cycfi XR and Nu pickups. Full range flat response, active noiseless pickups with high gain, audiophile quality active preamps. They sell a resonant low pass filter circuit to replace the tone knob and allow you to tame or crank the high end as much you please. Their 19 pin Nexus breakout system provides phantom power, eliminating the need for internal batteries.

Their hexaphonic pickups are the only ones on the market (aside from Ubertar) in a "normal" pickup form factor. Meaning, you pop out your regular single coil or humbucker bridge pickup, and pop the hex Nu pickup in that slot. The raw tone sounds like any other high end boutique quality electric guitar pickup, as good or better than any monophonic pickup you could ever find. No processing required. Certainly can't say the same about a GK.

I also really appreciate that they have extremely reasonable prices (the XR costs $80 and sounds way better than $200 JBE to my ears), excellent customer service (they provided me with detailed personalized schematics specifically for my unique wiring situation), open source engineering policy, and the fact that all of their electronics are designed for solder free wiring.

I've grown to become quite the fanboy of this company lol. I think of their founder Joel as a sort of Elon Musk of guitar electronics... Honestly heroic work he is doing imo

I used the GSP-2101 Artist with dual SDISC and the Control One for close to 15 years. It was the first device that gave me completely seamless patch changes (for the most part--there were circumstances where both SDISCs were used and it was impossible). I was blown away by the ability to come out of solo with heavy delay to a cleaner sound and have the delay from the solo patch decay naturally rather than cut out.

I have had one of those. I had to let I it go, as mine was defective and unreliable. But it was very deep, with its completely open effect chain structure. I don't know any hardware modeller that can do that. Not even the VG99 is that flexible. Great unit. My brother still has one...

I got another one for you.The Stellartone Micro Pedal II. I don't think they are made any more, and it's absolutely a shame. You can buy the onboard tone kits to install in your guitar, but the MPII was a one-of-a-kind tiny pedal. Think of it like a Vari-tone on an ES-355. The MPII unlike the I, had 1/2, 3/4, and full, which controlled how much of the effect blended into your guitar. Stellartone offered a "jazz" version, which I have, voiced darker than the regular model.

These pedals were like tiny passive parametric EQs/tone controls and I still haven't found an EQ that sounds quite as good for (in my case) adding a little smokey jazz sound to a guitar.

I used the Yamaha FX 500 in stereo with two Peavey 50w amps in the 80'sI never had the midi pedal boardI used to pre order my patches and use a foot switch to increment through the changesSo one song may be song 1, patch 1, intro, patch 2 rhythm, patch 3 solo, patch 4 rhythmsong 2 patch 5 clean etc..The patch change was REALLY BADI'd press the pedal, the guitar cut out, then came back on but without any effects at all, then the effects kicked in

The wildest preset was called Monk Akka!Distortion into stereo delay/reverb into a heavy flangerWhammy dive bomb and harmonics into that preset for an opener then into Faith no more From Out of NowhereHappy Days

I also agree on the spicetone 6appeal pedal. I was very surprised when I got the ripped speaker sound out of it.

At first I actually did think that I overloaded my speaker, but then checked the gain levels and sure enough it was the spicetone doing its thing on a clean setting with a little bit of drive gain added.

The Zoom GM-200 amp modeler, marketed 2000 or thereabouts. Failed in part because it's a fairly small plastic tabletop box, released with MSRP $250. Can be spotted for $50 or less; I paid $25 in 2011.

Basically, it's a DSP amp in a box. No pushbuttons, no memory... which means zero learning curve & no boot time. I figure it was intended primarily for home recording, & has stereo RCA outs available.

One little "ZNR" knob sets sensitivity on a very nice noise gate. Cranked up, it's not intrusive; set low, it takes out just the minimum noise floor.

The "Output Character" rotary puts an interesting spin on things, allowing outs to be shaped generally for headphones or board or amp. The board ("MTR") out is in stereo, which is very nice in phones. As a result of this knob, you've got 11 amp sims with 10 distinctive shapings, giving you 110 at-hand variants to tweak.

My go-to practice amp. Runs forever on AA cells, easy to carry around, few enough controls that I actually spend more time playing than tweaking. I originally intended to use it as the front end to the loop return on my Princeton Chorus (stereo 25w/25w).

Heres one I used and cloned into my VGs The Guyatone TO-2. Bill Ruppert mentioned that he used one of these as well. I still have my beat up original and two that are pristine.

heres the clone sound. Excuse the mistakes. This was done live at the end of a dead night on one of the boats I work on and the bartender said do one more, so I pulled up a track and just played something over it.